Parenting

He’s 12 next month, my eldest son, but he’s rejected the ‘movie night’ party I’ve suggested, and he doesn’t want any of his new friends from senior school to come for a sleepover. And I know why. Our television is a modest one, not the size of one of the screens flanking the main stage at Glastonbury. I recently went to pick up my son, who was at a new friend’s house. They were playing Mario Kart on a screen that took up about half a wall of the living room. Neither looked up when his mum let me in, so I stood in front of them. ‘Hello? Hel-LO?’ ‘It’s so hard when they’re on screens, isn’t it?’ exclaimed the other mum, as her son manoeuvred Luigi around Brain Rot circuit on Bilge Island with slack-jawed expertise.

There comes a moment, a few weeks after you give birth, when your baby outgrows their Lilliputian clothes and you’re obliged to replace ‘newborn’ with ‘0-3 months’. At which point, usually while still absolutely steaming with hormones, you find yourself sitting on their bedroom floor, staring at these teeny garments, trying to decide if you’re going to keep them (have another baby) or give them to the charity shop (start leaving leaflets about vasectomy around the house).  Historically, this was a major decision for you, but one which had almost no relevance to anyone else.

Yummy mummies everywhere, put your Veja trainers and frill-collar shirts away, because last week the Times issued a stinging broadside. Being labelled a ‘yummy mummy’ is apparently now so derogatory as to be an ‘almost cancellable offence’. The Yummy is dead, the headline declared, while my phone blew up like the fourth reactor at Chernobyl as Yummies far and wide forwarded me the article. ‘We are not dead!’ many fulminated, while others were more concise: ‘That’s just bollocks; I’ve never worn barrel jeans in my life.

My son’s first birthday has arrived, which feels like a much bigger milestone for us than it is for him. I had to let go of any expectations around motherhood early. At eight months pregnant I learnt that I could not have the calm, candlelit water birth I had planned (does anyone actually have one of those?). It transpired that I had a condition called placenta previa, and so would need a planned caesarean. The midwife cheerily told me not to worry about him ‘coming out the sunroof’ – a rather grating expression as it implies an easy way out, when I am, as it happens, a car without a sunroof. Then came the rather startling announcement from the surgeon that my baby was ginger (my husband and I are more Draco Malfoy than Ron Weasley).

Although I disagree with Donald Trump’s and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s suggestion that mothers who took Tylenol during pregnancy may have caused the huge rise of children born with autism in the US, I also can’t agree with the spate of articles and interviews that have followed – several by high-functioning autistic adults, others by parents of autistic children – basically saying it is great to be autistic. I understand that they are fearful that Trump’s idea of a “cure” could result in anyone with special needs being regarded as subnormal and a second-class citizen, but it’s not helpful, either, to pretend that autism is without its many frightful drawbacks. My son, 42, was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome on his 13th birthday in 1996.

As a species we are richer than we’ve ever been before. We live longer. We have more food to eat than is good for us. We have abundance in all things. And yet we are no happier than we were. In fact, many of us are downright unhappy. Among our woes is an epidemic of loneliness. Some 8.4 million of us are now living alone in Britain, and more than 3.8 million report being chronically lonely. We lock up more people in our prisons than ever and we can see for ourselves the signs of friction in our society, one which is clearly not entirely at peace with itself. So somewhere we have gone wrong. And I think I know where. It’s our families. They are simply too small. The average number of children born per woman in England and Wales has fallen to 1.

What do tech bros and pushy parents have in common? They’re both fond of citing Samuel Beckett’s most famous quote: ‘Fail again. Fail better.’ For parents, the line is invariably deployed when their ‘gifted’ child has underwhelmed at a crucial juncture. Let’s park the inconvenient fact that Beckett’s line has nothing to do with self-help. Just go with it and nod sympathetically while inwardly enjoying their elaborate contortions in an attempt to save face. Perhaps my favourite example is a West London mother (we’ll call her Polly). Her boy’s failure to get into Cambridge (‘It wouldn’t have been the right place for him anyway, so we’re pretty relieved!’) has proved to be a gift that continues giving.

‘Before you ask, Mummy, the answer is no.’ While this could be any number of conversations that I have with my seven-year-old daughter, this one has a particular tang. It is the thrice-annual bargaining round that I do in the run-up to any school holiday in which I try to get her to go to a kids’ camp. An executive at Goldman Sachs in equity sales does not work as hard as I do to seal the deal – but I fail every time.  For a brief, prelapsarian period when she was five and more biddable, I had some success. I managed to get her into all manner of summer holiday camps in Oxfordshire: activity camp, Shakespeare camp, tennis camp, even God camp. You name it, I signed her up. Sure, we had some argy-bargy at the moment of drop-off, but in she went.

There are three little words that strike horror into the heart of every parent of school-age children. They are the words that cause you to break out in a cold sweat or let out a moan in your sleep in the dead of night – even in the middle of winter. They are ‘school summer holidays’. Hear those three words and you may very well envisage jubilant children spewing from the school gates and then remember the dim, distant sun-kissed summers of your own youth. But mention them within earshot of a parent of appropriately aged offspring and you’ll see the light go out in their eyes. Oh yes, the kids are happy – just like the waving teachers who weep with joy to see their charges depart. But now it’s time for the parents to weep.

Neil Young once saved my life. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.  This was at an outdoor show in Finsbury Park in July 1993. I had pushed and squeezed my way almost to the front of a large crowd shortly after being passed something of dubious provenance to smoke. One moment everything was perfect: he was playing that romantic late career hit, ‘Harvest Moon’, the sun was setting, the moon, conveniently, rising, and I was swaying along, rapturous. But then, suddenly – bang… I fainted.  This is the only time in my 45-year gig-going career that this has happened. But I was gone. I was briefly unconscious, then I came to lying on my back on the grass, looking up at dozens of legs all around and above me, almost on top of me.